Concern of Privacy Affecting Facebook vs Snapchat Networks
Source:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119855144
In recent years, the popularity between Facebook and Snapchat has shifted amongst young adults and teenagers for various different reasons. These young adults and teenagers, otherwise known in the article as social media natives, make decisions about what social media platforms to post or share online given the context of how private they want their information to be. The study in this article uses communication privacy management (CPM) theory to investigate different network characteristics between Snapchat and Facebook to see how college students utilize them given the different concerns of privacy on each of these platforms.
These two platforms may be used by college students for different reasons. Facebook reaches larger and more diverse audiences while Snapchat has a more homogeneous audience of overall younger aged adults than Facebook. Therefore, Erin E. Hollenbaugh proposes in this study that the privacy concerns of both of these platforms are very different because users on Snapchat, unlike Facebook, have less concern of privacy and more self-expression. Because of these differences, Hollenbaugh concluded from her study that of the participants in the study (college students aged 18 to 20 using both Snapchat and Facebook on average at least once a week) :
- Network size on Facebook is larger than Snapchat.
- Network Diversity on Facebook is larger than Snapchat.
- They have more overall openness in their Snapchat privacy management practices.
- They have a higher concern for privacy on Facebook than on Snapchat.
- There is a positive relationship between network size and open privacy management practices (only on Snapchat).
- Snapchat users with more diverse networks reported more open privacy management practices.
Regarding the 6th result, in her post hoc results, she accounted for the presence of a parent or grandparent on the student’s Snapchat friend list, and her results were made even more apparent. Hollenbaugh suggested that this could be from college students redefining themselves now that they were newly apart from their families.
This study pulls together many different topics, including network structure and homophily. The larger the network on social media, the less privacy a user seems to have (as seen by Facebook). This affects users’ decisions of how to use and tailor their information to fit different types of audiences on these platforms. Users will be more open and express themselves on a platform with more homogenous audiences to them (as shown by Snapchat), supporting the idea of homophily in networks. These results are critical to present-day media and future social platforms because, depending on their goals of how users should engage on the applications, they should alter their privacy settings.